Day 11: Know Your A-B-C’s

We’ve talked a lot about the connection between thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

If you’re feeling happy, chances are you’ve been thinking happy, positive thoughts. Conversely, if you’re feeling anxious or upset, chances are you’ve been thinking negatively. These negative thought patterns can keep you feeling stuck and feeling sad or anxious.

When it comes to changing thinking patterns, it’s important to understand your patterns of thinking. When you do, you can choose to make changes in the way you think about things. Changing thought patterns change feelings and behavior. When you change that pattern, you can shut down that feedback loop that keeps you in that anxious cycle.

How can you do that? You learn your ABCs.

A – is your Activating event. It’s your alarm or trigger that activates your thoughts and feelings about an event or situation. It taps into those stored thoughts, feelings, and memories that shape your responses.

B – is for Beliefs. When your alarm is activated, your brain starts to assess the situation and forms beliefs about what is happening or will happen. If you have heightened anxiety, you will tend to formulate faulty beliefs and engage in those distorted patterns of thinking that trigger more anxiety.

C – is for Consequences. Our thoughts and beliefs lead us to respond in certain ways using coping strategies that we hope will quell the fear and worry that the trigger causes. A coping strategy is any mechanism we use to deal with a perceived or actual threat. (Remember, anxiety is based in our “fight or flight” threat response.)

Coping strategies that are helpful are referred to as adaptive coping strategies. Coping strategies that are unhelpful or dysfunctional are known as maladaptive coping strategies. People who suffer from anxiety tend to develop maladaptive coping strategies that maintain their anxieties or make them worse over time. Some of those ways maladaptive coping strategies might manifest include emotionally based anxiety responses or even physical anxiety symptoms such as racing heart or sweating.

Once you know your ABCs, you can begin to identify those faulty thoughts and beliefs that give rise to those maladaptive coping skills. You can decide what you want to change.

What thoughts and beliefs do you have that still hold you back?

A great way to discover your ABCs for an experience is to sit down and write it out.

First, your A – the alarm or activating event. Ask yourself, what happened? Just the facts.

Next, your Cs – what were the consequences of the ways you used to cope?

Finally, your Bs – What beliefs, thoughts or feelings were you experiencing at the time? What was going through your mind? Make a list of the thoughts, feelings and perceptions that you attach to the experience. When you have completed this task, read through each statement and then underline the thought that is most associated with the primary emotion you felt during the ‘A‘. That’s your hotspot. Now rate how much you believe this thought on a scale from 0 to 100.

Once you’ve done some exploration, you can begin to challenge your thinking and find better ways of coping when triggering situations arise.